NHS Policy Audit - working party

[KnottyAuty]

Following on from Thread #23 of the Peggie v NHS Employment Tribunal. Anyone who wants to help with survey/audit of paperwork against the Equality Act protected characteristics please join here 😊

Brilliant! You wims are flying - and I’m lagging behind!

Give me this evening to look at the back end of the Jotform.

some of the midlands trusts covered by a previous survey have a few gaps because the form has changed since we did them … if you’ve got some spare time id be very grateful for help to gather some of the website data thats a new part of the search?

Gosh!

”In August 2024 an older lady who underwent a major operation woke up to find she was in a small, sweltering hot, filthy, room with two men. She had to share bathroom facilities as well as walk by them to reach these”

That FOI sounds like the woman got quite a scare.

How do you know it’s a “mixed gender” policy?

Does the trust conflate sex and gender in a policy? Or is that a slight mix up in how you’ve phrased your question knowing that there was a breach?

@teawamutu if you have some extra time could you help me plug the gaps on these trusts please?

• North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare Trust
• Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Trust
• The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust
• Unversity hospital leicester.

We have the trans policies for these ones but we don't have the website information:
a) the same sex webpage pdf and URL
b) links to stonewall pdf and URL

Any chance you could do a lightning search on those ones please?!
Thanks

How do you know it’s a “mixed gender” policy?

I haven't been able to find the policy, it may need a FOI.
The reason I know is because I know of individual cases.

EMAS is in. Once the story is live, I'll post what I found here.

Obviously, as an ambulance service, they don't have ward provision. Nonetheless, they managed to do something that I was pretty unimpressed with.

Thanks! I just had a look at the back and can see what you mean!
Do post here - no need to wait for the story as I have no idea which examples they will pick in the end. And it's good to share the more outlandish elements because sometimes it flags patterns across a region that we might otherwise miss...

Course - tomorrow ok? Do I start a new form or what?

If you can make new entries for each trust we can combine/add info behind the scenes. Thank you !

It's pretty well-known by now that heart attacks present differently between women and men. Paramedics are also likely to be the first professionals responding to a heart attack. Other medical emergencies, such as ectopic pregnancy and priapism, are unique to one sex or the other. Therefore, you'd expect that paramedics and ambulance dispatchers would record sex accurately and ask questions based on sex.

EMAS's Health Inequalities page claims "We use sex-based questioning, not gender-based questioning", which you'd expect in a medical context. However, an utter legend with a WhatDoTheyKnow Pro account[1] FOIed EMAS as part of a batch of 256 public healthcare bodies in December 2023 about what their patient records systems actually store for gender.

Summary, for those who cannot read the images:

1. Call handlers in the dispatch centres, so the person at the other end of the phone when you dial 999, record "male", "female", "non-binary", and "unknown". I'm unclear what health conditions are non-binary specific.
2. Ambulance crews themselves record "Not known (not recorded)", "Male (including trans man)", "Female (including trans woman)", "Not specified", "Non-binary", "Not stated (person asked but declined to give a response)", and "Other (not listed)". I'm unclear as to what health conditions are specific to women and trans-identifying males but not men and trans-identifying females, and vice-versa.
3. "Other (not listed)" from (2) is followed by a symbol resembling a black clipboard with a white pencil, which I have just realised represents a free text field for writing in a patient's custom gender identity. In the back of an ambulance, when treating a patient who may be critically-ill, the paramedic is expected to write in "Esspigender" if the patient gives that.
4. The FOI response states that the options recorded by ambulance crews (2,3) were set by NHS England in their "Ambulance Data Set", indicating that recording these options may be a national practice.

[1]: I will contribute to the cost of one of these if the working group conveners consider it useful.

Can someone ping me the form link please in a DM. I think it's different to the London one? If not I can use that again.

Done!

Great example of where sex matters !

All done, @KnottyAuty - if you need more let me know.

I am deep in the documents for my trust (have only found ones because of Ermine's FOIs so far).

Fucks sake is all I have.

The NHS completely erasing sex and normal, sex-based language. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that anyone might have a science based view or want to use English as it's been used for centuries.

Fucking, fucks sake. Feeling very cross.

Sending hugs. It is an unpleasant task. My first trust took ages to do, partly because it was a mess (hello NHS Lothian) and partly because I had to keep leaving my desk to go cuddle my cat so as not to scream.

I know, I felt really quite sick after my first Midlands one. It’s gaslighting on an epic scale. Segueing seamlessly between sex and gender and acknowledging the reasons WHY single sex accommodation is important then switching to single gender (ie mixed sex) and ending up with when and how to report a breach. My mid is so boggled with it I had to keep actually shaking my head. to take in what I was reading as the cognitive dissonance was so strong.

The worst one I did had a multi purpose policy which included safeguarding, so all that nonsense was followed by a section on identifying vulnerable patients most at risk of sexual assault. I kid you not, the first listed characteristic was: “being female”. Aaagghh!

Make sure you take a break from reading these. Having to read all the London ones in close succession over a weekend did strange things to me. I became really paranoid and anxious because it is so fecking weird. Look after yourself!

Make sure you take a break from reading these. Having to read all the London ones in close succession over a weekend did strange things to me. I became really paranoid and anxious because it is so fecking weird. Look after yourself!

Thank you all.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that not everybody would be on board with their total disregard for the reality of sex, it's replacement by GI and their unilateral total upending of normal English language.

There is remarkably little about patients too.

Sadly I think this was pushed through mainly "because everyone is doing it" and keeping Stonewall happy/getting points. I imagine at the moment people are trying to dodge blame/avoid inspection but I wonder what the staff that did this will privately think about this in a few years?

Of course there's not! Don't you know the NHS exists to keep managers in their jobs, not to care for or nurse patients. Same as Adacemy "Trusts" exist to give CEOs and Executives jobs that pay enough to buy expensive cars to drive to your school to explain about budget cuts and redundancies (but that's another story).

Just found this on the NHS reddit page, a survey for NHS staff to complete.

Try not to roll your eyes at the first question:

https://rewiring.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dbgs8oKMpM1YtiS

"There is remarkably little about patients too." @thenoisiesttermagant

I have found this and even less about patients who are actual women who barely get a mention in some policies. I am increasingly wondering if this issue is in someway at the heart of the many scandals over maternity services. [not to derail]

You mean the centring of men and men’s issues, in health and other matters? Absolutely I think it’s at the heart of this. Because women are less important. That sentiment has its fingers in everything.

Frankly women are just like men but smaller and a bit defective, malfunctioning at different times of the month, pesky hormones changing all the time…

(Sarcasm, ofc)